GALFROMDOWNUNDER UPOVER

A lingering memory from my End to End By Friday escapade in 1997, buried deep in the internet here .  You know when you’ve been on the road a long time. You have a birthday. And then another. And another. Each time you’re surrounded by strange faces singing that universal happy birthday anthem, with the same tuneless clash when they hit that same high point in the song. But with strange words. "Cumpleaños a ti..." in Spanish. And so on. You know also when you’ve been going for a long time when you have a birthday and nobody at all sings for you. You’re staring at the road, or at the sky, or at your reflection in a coffee in a place where you’ve sheltered from weather you’d swear you’d never be caught dead in at home. Two months into my meander from the bottom of Britain to the top on a small folding bicycle, I rolled up to a phone box in Edinburgh. It was getting dark. I scanned my WWW list for promising comrades under ‘Scotland’. WWW is a travel friendship organisation of wo...

Dec 2014:  University of Hawaii Forestry Professor JB Friday helps me  nip an invasive albezia tree in the bud  UPDATE: December 2024: The end of an era.  I no longer own my sliver of fern-covered lava in Hawaii. It's been 18 years since I signed on the dotted line with a vague dream of following the flip-flops of my friend Ann Kobsa, whose 99.9% sustainable life in the Big Island was the initial inspiration to take the plunge (scroll way down for the lowdown on that).  But here I am, clearly a city mouse, because the closest I ever got to moving there was... well, talking about it. But, over the years, it gave me a wonderful excuse to visit IMO "the best place in America," where the sun and rain are free, where you can technically live under a tarp year round... the closest you can get to "true survival." Who doesn't secretly romance being off the grid?  Over the years the cost of holding onto this 8429 sqft,  pizza-slice-shaped lot land rose...

In my " decade from across the dining room table " as a former Bike Friday customer evangelist, I met so many extraordinary cyclists and adventurers that made my modest job feel like the best job in the world. Newly-nonagenerian Gerd Rosenblatt, an acclaimed former UC Berkeley physics professor certainly hasn't let the passing decades get in the way of HIS  physics ( watch him tackle this hill at age 74.5 ). I had the pleasure of crossing the country with him on an 80-120 miles-a-day Route 66 trip with PACTOUR in 2006 . While I now grumble if the mileage creeps north of 50, he's just kept piling on his odometer. Below is his personal account of his most impressive feat to date: a double century (that's 200 miles folks) at the ripe young age of 90. Go Gerd!  JUMP TO:  5 QUICK QUESTIONS FOR GERD ROSENBLATT  Grand Tour Lowland Double Century Cycling Report – Gerd Rosenblatt – 90th Birthday Ride June 24, 2023 Background This is a report on the double century that I ...

On becoming an accidental candidate at a job fair at the height of the 2009 recession UPDATED 2023 with additional intel.  Originally published: 2/25/2009.  Read an edited version of this post on Fastcompany We interrupt this program for a report from the cold, hard pavement outside your window. A jobseeking friend invited me to join her at a Women for Hire Career Fair  2009 at the Sheraton New York. Thinking it might provide a palpable insight into the current state of the nation for my FastCompany blog , I hastily printed out my resume as required (complete with a nice glaring typo - doh!) and jumped in a cab to make it by curtain call. Might I add, my color printer suddenly chose to malfunction that day, and printed out a resume striated in red, white and blue, like a glorious 8 1/2 x 11" American flag. No matter, it's a just a formality for my friend's benefit, right? On arriving at the entry cutoff time of 1.15pm - 45 minutes before the advertised closing time of 2pm...